The caudle simmered over the fire. The room felt warm and safe from the bitter cold and snow outside. Warm with light, warm with heat, warm with friendship. My heart soared even as I prayed that I would survive this childbirth, that my son would survive, too.

From When the Moon Has No More Silver, by Connie Lapallo

I tried to force my voice. “Oh, how wonderful for you, Pocahontas.” I still could not look up. Instead, I focused my attention on brushing the dirt off my petticoat. My ragged, ragged petticoat.

Since I did not rise, Pocahontas dropped beside me and touched my shoulder, asking gently, “Is all well? Something hurts your heart, Joan?” Her English had become so much better yet still had its Indian wording.

I shook my head as tears dropped onto my lap.

“No. My heart…it…it does not hurt.” Liar! I could not brush the tears to hide them because my hands were so dirty. Instead, I took a deep breath, looked over at her, and tried to make my eyes bright. “England!” was all I could say. “Home to England…”

From When the Moon Has No More Silver, by Connie Lapallo

Do you think we will ever know “Jane’s” real name?

 No, not unless something happens genetically where the DNA is somehow matched with a particular family’s DNA. I’d imagine it to be a great longshot.

The reason is that according to the Spanish, a hundred women were on the 1609 expedition. (For purposes of this blog entry, I’ll treat it as exactly 100 women, although of course, it may have been slightly fewer or more.) Of these one hundred, the vast majority have never been identified. This is a tragic consequence of the loss or destruction of so many Virginia Company documents dating from 1607 to 1619. The documents that survive are helpful, but conspicuously missing are the lists of settlers on most ships except for the earliest ships of 1607 and 1608.

Ten of the one hundred women were shipwrecked in Bermuda following a hurricane.

Of the ninety remaining women, we can only positively identify a handful:

Mistress Collines (Collins), murdered by her husband during the Starving Time

1. Joan Peirce
2. Joan’s young daughter, Jane Peirce
3. Thomasine Causey
4. Temperance Flowerdew Barrow Yeardley

Another woman and child who survived the Starving Time are Anne Burruss Laydon (who arrived in 1608) and her daughter Virginia, born about Christmas 1609. Obviously, neither of these were part of the 1609 expedition.

We know four of the names (Peirce, Peirce, Causey, and Yeardley) because they are the few who survived long term and had their names and arrival years accounted for in later records. We know Mistress Collines’s name because Captain John Smith and Governor George Percy each documented her murder and the execution of her husband for it.

Other women survived and may have been present for the Starving Time, but documentation of their arrival is lacking. These include Mistress Joan Wright the midwife (arrived by 1610), Joan Salford and Sara Salford (arrived by 1611), and Rachel Davis (arrived by 1613).

“Jane,” the fourteen-year-old whose skeleton was found, would be among the roughly 90 women and children who arrived in the summer of 1609 and found themselves thrust into the Starving Time. Since we can only positively five of the 90 arriving women, 85 remain faceless and nameless.

Of about 550 settlers to begin that brutal winter, only 60 (about 11%) were still living when help arrived in late May 1610. This means that only about one of every ten men, women, and children survived. And then, some of these survivors were in such bad shape that they later died, according to the leaders’ reports—meaning the death toll climbed even higher than 89%.

If we apply that death rate (89%) to the 90 women and children, that means that perhaps only 10 survived the winter. We know who 4 of those estimated 10 survivors are, as stated above.

The skeleton identified as JR156 may have been Mistress Forrest of the 1608 supply ship Mary & Margaret; she may have died prior to the Starving Time. “Jane,” then, would stand alone as the face of the many nameless women and children who entered the winter of 1609 with ever diminishing hope and who never saw the spring in Virginia.

Then I began to read the articles, and the inaccuracies stunned me—particularly the articles further afield from the primary articles. I’ve spent fifteen years researching and writing about the women and children of Jamestown. In March, I presented my first academic paper about these women and children at the Virginia Forum. I was able to present an honor roll, a list I have compiled of up to 50 women of the 65 surviving women and children in 1616.

But then I read the comments. Comments so crass and cruel about the death of a child—a child who, although she lived 400 years ago—had the same dreams, fears, and feelings as any young girl would have today. Comments that did nothing but make fun of the cannibalism of this child. It made me feel ill. Have we fallen that far that we do not care? That a death becomes a moment to ridicule someone with opposing views in the present day or to push a political agenda?

I understand the experience of Jane’s fleet as well as anyone. That was the primary focus of my research for Dark Enough to See the Stars in a Jamestown Sky. I tell you that I know of no one in the present day that would not buckle and despair if he or she endured what these colonists did.

The men, the fathers, were mostly soldiers, home from fighting Spain in the Low Countries. Virginia had so much promise. Five hundred people signed on—one hundred of them women and children (according to Spanish intelligence).

These settlers lived aboard ship in the ’tween deck for months.  They were not passengers, they were cargo. This vessel was the size of a school bus with the windows blackened out—dark, dank, sickly, and smelly.

They were not allowed up on the deck. Their food came to them in a bucket with the only guaranteed rations being moldy, wormy sea biscuits. Had nothing else happened, they would have arrived in Virginia weakened. But the worst wasn’t over for this voyage yet—a hurricane at sea and the Jamestown Starving time awaited the weary travelers….

Now, whether you believe in ghosts or not, as we near Halloween, I’ll tell you about the ghosts of today’s Henricus.

Do I believe in ghosts? If you’ve ever had the disquieting experience of seeing such a thing, you (1) never forget it and (2) never doubt it again. Although I’ve had many ghost experiences personally, I’ve only actually seen two. Once I saw a ghostly white figure move from room to room in the empty plantation house at Berkeley. I was a tour guide closing up one dark winter evening. (Funny how quickly you can close up a big house when you suddenly realize you’re in a hurry to get out!)

As for Henricus, I was doing a signing this past September when the author of several ghost books approached me. “You do know this place is haunted, don’t you?”

I looked around—bright and sunny, cheerful, children running to see the river. Haunted? Really?

She told me that she herself had seen a seventeenth century gentleman in breeches. She then told me about a paranormal investigation at Henricus which would take place toward the end of October. It would culminate in a chance to sleep in Mount Malady (the recreated hospital) overnight. I was hooked.

My daughter Sarah, my son Mike, and Sarah’s boyfriend Dale decided to come along. The first experience I had occurred before the paranormal investigation had even started. I was standing near my usual signing spot on the bluff. An interpreter was telling an old ghost story. As I listened, I saw another interpreter standing off to the side. “There’s Captain Argall,” I whispered to my daughter, who was standing behind me. Captain Argall, of course, being the person the interpreter portrayed. A moment went by. Suddenly, to my left and behind me, I heard a voice whisper, “Connie!”

I turned around, startled. Was it my daughter? One look told me no. Besides, she wouldn’t call me by my first name. No one else seemed to hear it. It left me wondering: if I know many of these old settlers’ names, spending (so far) fourteen years researching their lives and stories, do they also know me? Who called my name at Henricus?

One of the directors told us an intriguing story. During the middle of the day, he was giving a tour in the corps de garde (the recreated soldiers’ quarters.) The corps de garde is a small house, just one room large. The director was facing a window giving his tour when suddenly a woman with a classic round English or Dutch face walked past the window. He saw her for a good four of five seconds, solid as could be, wearing earth tons of green and brown.

The director knew she wasn’t one of his interpreters, so he quickly looked out the door. There was no sign of an interpreter—or of a seventeenth century ghost, for that matter. “Did you see that?” he asked the tourists. No, they said. They had been facing the director, not the window. “And that,” the director told me, “changed my relationship with this settlement forever.”

In another house, investigators and staff told us they frequently hear children playing. And in the planter’s house, apparently, lives a female spirit and her two children, a girl aged about fourteen and a boy about eight. Their voices turn up on recordings, and Zach, one of the paranormal investigators, told of many a strange evening spent in that little home.

Back at the corps de garde, I stepped just inside the door and felt a strange presence. I won’t deny it. “This ghost doesn’t like electronic equipment,” Zach warned me as he stood outside, peering through the door.

The hour was about three a.m., eerie even if you aren’t standing alone inside a dark, recreated seventeenth century soldiers’ quarters! “What’s your name?” I called out. Did I expect an answer? I don’t know. It was just an impulse.

I felt something pushing me away. My feet were planted firmly, but the rest of me was somehow leaning awkwardly backward.

“I don’t think he wants us here,” Zach said. This was curious, as I hadn’t told him about being pushed.

I straightened and almost immediately felt myself leaning backward again. Hmm.

“Now I see a face just in front of you,” Zach said. “He’s an old soldier with a white beard.”

“Do you have a Van dyke?” I asked the soldier. Van dykes were what the folks of the time called that particular style of beard. Zach was young. I wondered if he even knew that this was the style, yet he had described it.

Curious, Zach asked me, “You asked his name. What did you get?”

“It probably doesn’t mean anything,” I replied because indeed, a name had popped into my mind. The name was Walter. Now, in both Dark Enough to See the Stars and When the Moon Has No More Silver, there’s an old soldier named Walter. Walter befriends Joan and Tempie the day he buries…. Well, I won’t tell you exactly, in case you haven’t read the book. But Walter does make a kind gesture in the midst of a Starving Time. And during the settlers’ move to Henricus, Walter again tries to help Joan and Tempie.

Zach didn’t know anything about my books. I’m not even sure he knew I’d authored them. He and I were standing alone at the far end of the settlement.

“I felt the name ‘Walter,’” I said at last.

Zach jumped back, visibly startled. “I got the name Walter, too!”

“You did?”

Then I stopped and pondered. I had spent a good deal of time researching my books at Henricus. Why had I named the old soldier Walter? I just remember that name had popped into my head, the same way it had popped into it tonight.

Women and children and old soldier named Walter. Henricus was sounding very much like my books…. Or maybe, my books were sounding very much like Henricus!

I do love to write, but I spend far more time on paperwork, and far less time writing, than I’d like. And I’ve received somewhere around a thousand—I don’t know how many, but at least that—emails, and some are quite interesting!

One email came to me out of the blue came from Kia, Greece, a few years ago. The sender was Marcie Mayer, a transplanted American married to a Greek and now the owner of Red Tractor Farm. Marcie had found my website because acorns are one of her passions. Marcie is a cancer survivor who believes in all her being that acorns are an overlooked crop. Yes, knowing what I know now, I agree.

Now, I never thought acorns and I were going to have such a close relationship. Honestly, I never did. I had that day—a very real day in October 2005—when I was writing my first novel, Dark Enough to See the Stars in a Jamestown Sky, and had that “aha!” moment. The ground was covered in acorns—literally a rolling blanket. And I was out walking in my neighborhood and thinking, as I always did, about those poor women at Jamestown thrown into the Starving Time.

John Smith had said the sixty emaciated survivors of that brutal winter of 1609 to 1610 “were preserved for the most part, by roots, herbes, acornes, walnuts, berries, now and then a little fish.” Until that moment, I had planned to give each food source equal credit for the survival of the real heroines in my story. (No one knows precisely how some few did survive—only about ten percent—while so many others perished.) Joan Peirce and Temperance Yeardley had survived and lived for many years in situations both desperate and severe.

That fall day, I picked up an acorn lying at my neighbor’s yard, and said, “What do I really know about acorns, anyway?”

I arrived home with a few tucked in my pocket, and then sat looking at them. I really knew very little. But research showed acorns to be high in protein, B vitamins, potassium, magnesium, and calcium. In other words, those who had eaten acorns were receiving vital nutrients in a starvation situation. And so from there, acorns became an important part of the first novel. I wrote about the women, living at Jamestown without their husbands, realizing in the fall that their situation was deteriorating.

Now about once a month or so, I’ll hear from someone that they can’t see acorns without thinking of me! I often receive acorn gifts, like an acorn-shaped bird feeder. Acorns and I? Who knew?

Connie, last year our Holly Hills book club was honored to host your presence to review your book about Jamestown…..we still discuss our thrill at hearing wonderful stories from you….  Five ladies have gone to Jamestown Island to celebrate the miracle of ACORNS!  We often place acorns in each other’s mail boxes in honor of the brave women.

~ Debbie G.
Williamsburg, VA

While walking these last few days I have been thinking about Joan and how she struggled with her roots and acorns. I have seen native trees with fruit and seeds and wondered what she might have done with  them. You have made her come alive. Maybe she knows it. Do you think? In addition to your research I have really been moved by your rich literary quotations and your spiritual depth. Amazing. Blessings.

 ~ Warren H.
Columbia, SC